


Burning from the Inside Out

by theorangewitch



Series: Angstober [26]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Cancer, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 14:11:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16536083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theorangewitch/pseuds/theorangewitch
Summary: The day she found out her mother’s prognosis, Cooper Chang set her bedroom on fire.





	Burning from the Inside Out

**Author's Note:**

> Second to last Angstober piece, and the second one I'm making up for the weekend I missed, this time for Day 27 - Losing a loved one. If you can't tell, I've been working through some things!
> 
> The link to the full list of Angstober prompts can be found in the author's note of the first work in this series.

The day she found out her mother’s prognosis, Cooper Chang set her bedroom on fire. Not on purpose, of course. She went home from the hospital with her dad, Jamie Howard, while her mom, Lady Enchanter General Maria Chang, stayed so that they could run more tests. Not that they really needed any more. A year, maybe less. That was the amount of time that Lady Chang, brave, powerful, compassionate, diplomatic Lady Chang had left to live. Lady Chang, who should’ve been immortal, not just because she was the most powerful Enchanter on the east coast, but because she was Cooper’s mother. 

As soon as she was through the door of her house, Cooper stormed upstairs to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. And then she wept, deep, shuddering sobs that wracked the whole room. She heard footsteps approach her door a few times, maybe her father, maybe her mother’s best friend, Flora Cartwright, who’d come to stay with them. But they never knocked. Never opened the door, even though it was unlocked. Cooper roared at her ceiling fan. Like a lion, like a dragon. Screamed like a harpy. Her tears stung her eyes and seared her cheeks. Her face burned. She didn’t even notice the smell of smoke or the heat in the room until she felt a sharp pain in her foot. She looked down, blinking away her tears, and saw flames licking at the sole of her shoe, melting it away. 

It was at that moment that Jamie and Flora burst through her door and grabbed her up. She was still wailing as her father carried her downstairs and outside while Flora stayed to put out the fire. 

Magic was a finicky thing. It took great skill to make it do at is it was told. Great force of will to summon it and make it obey. It rarely came to the Human call of its own free will, and Enchanters were, at their cores, Human. But Cooper had summoned fire and set her curtains and her bedspread alight, almost entirely by accident. She surveyed the damage after the blaze had been put out, leaning against her father’s arm. Sunlight streamed through the window where the remains of the curtains hung, and Cooper thought that it didn’t seem fair that the sun would continue to shine like this while her mother was dying. It felt like the world should be grieving too. Maybe that was how Cooper managed to set her room on fire. To manifest her pain physically. Emotional magic was rare, of course. It took finesse to call it, not just raw will. But in theory, it was possible. 

_ Well, I guess it’s not theory anymore _ , she mused. 

She slept on the couch that night. The next morning, she and Flora got to work on repairing the damage. Pulling the charred curtain threads longer and longer and weaving the disparate pieces of fabric back together, then doing the same to her duvet, with the added task of charming the down that had escaped around her room so that it floated neatly back into place. It was amazing how easy magic made this. If they weren’t Enchanters, this fire would’ve been a nightmare. New curtains, a new duvet, new pillows and a new mattress. New carpet. Even new paint to cover the scorch marks on the walls. 

But anyone who thought magic could fix everything was dreadfully mistaken, and they found that out almost as soon as the came into contact with it. It could repair a charred room, sure, but it couldn’t do a damn thing to save Lady Chang’s life. It couldn’t even  _ extend  _ her life long enough for regular medicine to save her. The best it could do was ease her pain.

And so, that’s what Cooper did over the long months as her mother burned from the inside out. She was in and out of the hospital at first, because there was still a chance, however small, that she’d go into sudden remission and recover.

“But I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” the doctor said, shaking her head. “Ovarian cancer is rarely treatable if it isn’t caught early.” 

But then as the months dragged on, Lady Chang came home and stayed there. They hired a nurse to take care of her, because Jamie still had work and Cooper still had school. After she got home and her homework was done, Cooper would crawl into bed with her mother, and they’d talk, or watch something, or else just lie there together. 

“You should be at the age where you hate me,” Lady Chang said in the middle of an episode of  _ Parks and Recreation _ . 

“You’re dying, Mom,” Cooper pointed out. “I can’t hate you.” 

“Are you thinking about college?”

Cooper nodded. “I wrote my Common App essay over the summer. I have a few places I’m working on the applications for, but I’ll probably just go to Emory like Dad.”

“You don’t have to do everything he and I do.”

“But I want to.”

Lady Chang ran her hand through her daughter’s thick, bushy curls. Everyone said that Cooper looked just like her mother, but this trait she’d inherited from her father. Lady Chang’s own hair had fallen out months and months ago, but was slowly growing back as they took her off chemo to make her dying weeks as comfortable as possible. 

“Do you need anything, Mommy?” Cooper hadn’t called her mother ‘Mommy’ since she was five years old. 

“Hmm, just some water, maybe,” Lady Chang replied. Her eyes had fluttered shut and she was breathing deeply and loudly. 

Cooper got it for her. When she came back to the bedroom, though, her mother was fast asleep. She put the glass of water on the nightstand and climbed back in next to her mother. She crawled under the covers, then she pressed her forehead into her mother’s temple and cried. Softly, this time. With no fire, only water. Lady Chang had always preferred water magic anyway. 


End file.
